The Burning Air (24 page)

48

W
ILL BLINKED AT the phone. “I don’t understand.”

“Will? Dad?” said Sophie. Her teeth had started to chatter. Rowan showed her the phone.

“It looks as if Matt dialed 999 on Will’s phone and then hung up. It looks as if the police haven’t been called at all.”

Everyone started shouting at once. Rowan blocked the discordant “What the hells” and “Oh Christ” and turned to Will.

“Call them again. Go to the top of the lane and call them again. Give them Matt’s name and say he misled us that he’d called them the first time.”

“Why would he . . .” Will said, staring stupefied at the screen.

There wasn’t time. “Just go and call them again, do whatever they tell you to.” Will scrambled from the table and ran back to the car whose key had never left the ignition.

“Where are you going?” screamed Sophie as the retreating headlights left the kitchen in relative darkness.

Now that it was too late, Rowan wondered if he should have kept Will back for the time it took to share what little he knew, but before an internal debate could begin, the questions started up again, his children’s words tumbling unintelligibly over each other. Only Jake, in his corner, was shocked, or confused, into silence.

“Why would Matt
do
that?” said Felix. “Why would he not call the police, why would he lie to us about going after them?”

“It’s a mistake,” said Tara. “He’s going to be
mortified
when he realizes.”

Rowan looked at each of his children in turn.

“I’m so sorry. It’s
him
. It’s Matt. Darcy Kellaway is Matt’s real name.”

Sophie collapsed against Felix, who himself looked close to folding. Tara placed both palms on the tabletop and let out a horrible sardonic laugh.

“So now you’re saying that not only has Kerry been pretending to go out with Felix, but Matt’s pretending to go out with me as well? What’s wrong with you, Dad? What the hell are you doing, inventing these little farces while your granddaughter is
missing
?”

“Tara, I don’t know what it means, I don’t know what he’s been playing at, but—”

“
Playing
? Dad. Look. I know you want an explanation for this, but you’re really clutching at straws here. I
know
Matt. His name is Matthew Rider, I’ve seen it on his credit cards, he virtually lives in my flat, I sleep with him, I
know
him.”

“That’s what I thought about Kerry,” said Felix.

“There you go! How do you know it’s not her, behind it all? How long have you known Kerry—what, a couple of months? I’ve been going out with Matt for nearly
two years
.”

“Tara,” said Rowan. “I remember him, I met him.”

“Well you hadn’t remembered him at any point previously over the last eighteen months, have you?”

Rowan sighed heavily. “He’s
changed
himself. He’s had his teeth sorted, and he’s filled out and he . . .” The real reason for recognition seemed surreal, now that he was going to voice it. “Look, I had two conversations with him when he was a boy, and both times he made this strange sort of throat-clearing noise, a choking that came out of nowhere. I’d never heard anyone make that noise again, but then Matt did it up at the cottage. That’s why I’m so sure it’s him. I know it sounds strange, I know it sounds ridiculous, but—”

“No, it doesn’t,” said Tara. She suddenly looked exhausted and her voice sounded drugged. “I know exactly what you mean.” Rowan watched as his daughter’s faith fell away from her. She locked eyes with Felix. They have made fools of us both, they said in silence. I know what you are going through because I am going through it too. Rowan felt his heart break twice, two discrete fractures in such rapid succession that they felt like one.

“What does it mean, Mum?” said Jake. “Who
is
Darcy Kellaway? Has Matt got Edie?”

Tara stretched out her arms to Jake, then pulled him close around his waist. Their embrace mirrored the way Sophie clung to Felix farther along the bench. Tara’s right hand scrabbled about on the table until she found Sophie’s. Rowan desperately wanted to be held himself but there was no one left over for him.

“No, but listen, this could be a good thing,” said Felix.

“How the bloody hell do you work that out?” said Tara.

“If they’re all together, Kerry won’t let the baby come to any harm. You know how much she dotes on her. That’s
if
she’s gone of her own free will. Don’t look at me like that Tara, no one knows anything. And they can’t be far away. I mean, it’s only, like, ten minutes since we saw Matt get into his car . . .” A new awareness crept across his face. “Oh, Jesus. I persuaded him to go. What if they were in the
car
?”

“You
saw
him?” said Sophie, chopping her way out of Felix’s embrace and staggering to her feet. “You didn’t say you’d
seen
him.”

“I did,” replied Felix. “When Will said Matt was on the lookout I confirmed it. I didn’t make a big thing of it because I didn’t know who he was then, did I? Yes, he came back from the search to—oh,
Christ
. He came back from the search he was
supposed
to be on. If he was taking Edie and Kerry with him, why would he come
back
? And why was he looking in the cottage?”

“They couldn’t get into the cottage, it’s like Fort Knox,” said Rowan with conviction. “I saw to that myself.”

“It’s—it’s not, actually,” said Jake shamefacedly. “If you slide up the metal rather than pulling it you can get in and out quite easily. Well, you can get in, anyway. I dunno if you’d be able to get out from the inside if it was down.”

“How do you know—” Tara began, but was cut off by Felix.

“We’ve only got his word for the fact it was empty. We didn’t look that hard, did we, because we met Matt and we bloody took his word for it. Oh, shit, what if they were there after all? What if he was coming back
for
them? We saw him leave but we didn’t see how far he went. He’ll have had to come back for them.”

They were all in the garden in seconds, torches in their hands and around their wrists. The change in temperature fogged Rowan’s glasses. He took them off to rub them and saw his children scrambling up the gentle slope of the garden. Twenty-five years before, this way had been a rock face to them. Now they moved in a grotesque imitation of their younger selves at play. They were halfway to the back wall before Tara realized that Jake was with them.

“What the hell are you doing here? Get back into the house.”

“You need me to show you how you get the thing off the cottage.”

“Felix will work it out. Jake, get back into the house.”

“I want to find Edie!”

Tara put her hands on his shoulders. “Look, we can’t leave the boys on their own, can we?”

“
You
look after them, then. You’re a mum.”

Patience came hard to Tara at the best of times and Rowan admired her control now.

“I need to talk to Matt, if he’s there. So does Dad. And obviously Sophie needs to be there for Edie. We need an
adult
to stay back, to tell Will what’s happened, when he gets back with the police. Can you do that for me? Can I trust you, Jake?”

The word “adult” had swung it. Jake nodded, clearly, gratified to be given the responsibility.

“OK, I want you to get back into the house. Wait outside the bunker with the rest of the boys, make sure no one gets in. If anyone comes in who you don’t know, lock yourself in with them. OK?”

Jake blinked.

“OK, Jake? This is important.”

“I get it,” he said.

Felix and Sophie plunged into the cloud but Rowan hesitated and tugged on Tara’s sleeve.

“Is this a good idea, leaving him in the house on his own? What if Matt comes back for him?” he said.

“Dad, I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I expect that they’re long gone by now. And I meant what I said; Will’s going to need someone to tell him where we’ve all gone, and the police, too. And we don’t know what’s on the other side of the hill. If the worst comes to the worst I don’t want Jakey to see anything more than he already has.”

If the worst comes to the worst. Rowan’s heart tightened again. The idea that there might be worse to come tonight was almost more than he could bear.

49

T
HEY HAD RAISED their voices in the house. Now, as though by consensus, they all spoke in whispers, despite the covering rustle and hush of leaves and branches.

“If he’s there, we’ll tell him the police are on their way for real this time,” murmured Felix.

“Let’s play it by ear,” said Rowan. “For all he knows, Will never came back and we still don’t know what he’s done.” He allowed himself a second’s grimace at the irony. They
didn’t
know what he had done, not really. The chunks of information they had were somehow less than the sum of their parts.

A lifetime of doing everything together served them well now; they fell into step and seemed to breathe with one breath. How far was it to the cottage? One minute? Two? It was not the kind of thing one ever thought to measure. The soft white glow emanating from the cottage took an age to come into focus.

Felix was the first to kill his light and immediately Rowan did the same. All four stayed still to allow their eyes to adapt. The metal grille, which had been secure against the old doorway minutes earlier, had been lifted off the main door of the cottage and leaned against one of the windows. Light shone through the holes in tiny spindles.

Sophie tried to break into a run but Tara grabbed her.

“Look, we don’t know what we’re going to find,” she whispered. “Let’s take it easy.”

Rowan and his children approached the cottage slowly and in silence, as though playing hide-and-seek. They drew near its blind side, the open doorway on sideways. With no window in the facing wall it was impossible to tell how many were inside. The spindles of light were unbroken, suggesting that whoever was in the cottage was still. Because they knew the family was coming, and were waiting? Because they were restrained and could not move? Because they would never move again?

“We should have brought something,” said Felix as they approached the threshold. He did not have to explain what he meant. Matt worked out, he lifted weights, he was strong and fit. Even outnumbered he was a force to be reckoned with. Rowan kicked himself for not making them bring one of the shovels from the garden. The torch in his hand, purchased as much for its light heft as its strong beam, would be useless as a baton and Felix’s wasn’t much better.

“Maybe we should just wait here until the police arrive,” breathed Tara.

“No way,” said Sophie. “They could be another half hour.”

She broke free from Tara’s grasp, rounded the building, and disappeared through the door. Without discussion or (on Rowan’s part at least) forethought the others spilled in behind her. Now they were all in the empty shell of the cottage, staring into to the brilliant white eye of an electric lantern that rested in the center of the floor. It was designed like an old-fashioned storm lantern so that it strongly illuminated one spot rather than throwing a circle of light all around. Rowan had never seen it before. It didn’t come from the house; it was too powerful and new to be theirs. A couple of cigarette butts—a little swoop of disappointment in Jake tugged at his terror—were ground out on the floor at the lantern’s base.

Rowan picked the lantern up and made for the little low bedroom.

“Hello?” he said. “Edie? Kerry?”

Before their wedding, Rowan and Lydia had once trysted in there; he recalled the dimensions of the place, not high enough for a man to stand up in but perfectly able to accommodate Kerry and Edie. He ducked into the doorway, trying to quell the violence of his heartbeat. Inside, there was nothing but dead leaves and dust. The light at the end of the tunnel abruptly turned into a solid brick wall. He backed out, straightened himself up, and turned the lantern to face the main doorway.

“No,” he said.

Sophie’s mouth became a perfect circle and she seemed physically to deflate. Had Felix’s arms not encircled her waist she would have fallen to the floor. Only by following the line of her gaze did Rowan see the reason for her silent scream.

Matt’s broad form filled the narrow doorway. The cottage had been built for undernourished peasants, not strapping modern men. In his left hand he held something small and shiny, wrapped in a rag. The beam of the lantern on the floor illuminated him full in the face and he blinked in its dazzle. Rowan saw him now through the lens of his new knowledge. The teeth had been done, as he’d surmised, and naturally the extra weight changed everything, and of course the short hair made a difference, but my God, how did I not
get
that?

Matt’s face wore an expression of panic—literally, blind panic, in the seconds that he was too dazzled by the glare of his own light to see who was inside the cottage. Slowly his eyes adapted and the MacBrides came into focus. “You!” he shouted at all of them. He kicked at the doorway and a jagged stone shot from its pointing. “Fuck!” he said, and began to shake.

The knowledge came to Rowan like a trickle of cold sweat down his spine that Matt, or Darcy, or whatever this monster wanted to call himself, had no more idea where Kerry and Edie were than they did.

50

“
M
ATT?” SAID TARA softly, in a half baby-voice that Rowan recognized as the kind shared between lovers. “What’s going on? Where’s Edie?”

Matt—would calling him by his real name provoke or placate him?—did not respond. The tantrum of moments before was replaced by a kind of surface serenity that was more chilling than any loss of temper. The rag in his hand slipped to reveal, in his grip, Will’s blowtorch. He looked down at his hand, faintly bemused as if wondering how on earth it had got there.

One of the girls—or was it Felix?—began to snivel.

Sophie dropped to her knees, making a soft thud as she connected with the earth and entered the makeshift spotlight. Her hands were pressed together. Rowan wondered if she was about to start praying and prepared to kneel himself and join her.

“Please,” said Sophie. “Where’s Edie?” She unclasped her hands and raised muddy palms to Matt. “I’m begging you.”

“I’d love to be able to help you,” he managed eventually. “But to tell you the truth, I’m fucked if I know. They were supposed to be here, but it doesn’t look like they’ve kept the appointed rendezvous.” He looked at Sophie. “You don’t seem to be very good at keeping hold of your children, do you? Let’s have another look. Let’s throw a bit of light on the subject.” He made a tiny movement of his thumb on the blowtorch’s trigger switch. The blue-and-orange flame was a dragon’s belch and the fierce, dense noise drowned out thought.

All of them took a step or two backward, Sophie shuffling on her knees. Their bodies were pressed against the walls, in the pitchy hollows of the cottage that the lantern could not reach, yet they each remained little more than a flame’s length away from Matt. There were four of them and one of him, but he had them entirely surrounded.

He released the trigger and the flame was momentarily extinguished; the world seemed darker and quieter in the relative absence of light and sound. The scent it left was one Rowan had not smelled since he gave up cigarettes in the ’70s—the sickly sweetness of lighter fuel.

Felix was next to the barricaded window. In his peripheral vision Rowan saw his son fiddle with the grille in a desperate attempt to see if escape was possible that way.

Matt saw it too. He pointed his weapon at Tara and said to Felix, “If you move another muscle, I’ll burn your sister’s face off. I’ll do her eye to match yours.”

“Where is my baby?”
cried Sophie.

Matt threw out another jet of fire, aiming the torch vertically this time so that it licked the crumbling beams of the ceiling. There wasn’t much wood left in the structure but Rowan guessed there was enough for a blaze to take hold. Will had gone to call the police, but not the fire brigade. For the first time that evening—for the first time
ever
—Rowan feared for his own life. Just as his distress over Lydia had been eclipsed by terror for Edie, his current horror obliterated both of those concerns. This new fear was a physical force and an unstoppable one. His body temperature increased by degrees; his skin was crying out for cold air but to remove his jacket could be interpreted as a threat by Matt. He sweltered in silence.

“Matt, please,” said Tara. “Why are you doing this?”

Matt took his thumb off the trigger. “Ask your father. We go way back.” He glanced at Rowan. “She likes to call
me
Daddy, by the way. You know. In bed.”

Rowan tried not to react but his suppressed flinch turned into a full-body shudder.

If he tried to say something clever it would be the wrong thing. How could one ten-second sentence compete with a seventeen-year grudge? How could reason triumph over obsession?

“They already know who you are.”

“Oh, I might have fucking known. You couldn’t even let me have that moment, could you? Is there
anything
you won’t take from me?”

Rowan sensed rather than saw the confused looks his children exchanged.

“Please, calm down, Matt . . . Can I call you that? If you’d prefer me to address you as . . .”

“Don’t you
dare
. Don’t you fucking
dare
. You’re not fit to say that name!” Matt sent spittle flying through the air, each torch-lit globule seeming to contain a word. “You
killed
that boy, you and your family. I had
one chance
to make my mother happy and you stole it. So you could keep your smug little world complete. To keep people like me away—I know what you think. I know what you’re like, you and that evil wife of yours. Don’t even get me started on
her
.”

The burning pages of Rowan’s recollection recoiled from the fire, threw off the curling flames at their edges and smoothed themselves flat. That Matt might be in possession of the facts about Lydia was almost as terrifying as the weapon in his hand.

“If you believe that we stole the scholarship from you, I understand your anger,” he said, hoping that he could keep the conversation hinged on this earlier aspect of Matt’s delusion and avoid a return to Lydia’s later involvement. “But I promise you, that’s not the way it was.”

“Bullshit,”
said Matt, a thick vein cording the length of his neck. “You didn’t pay for their school fees.”

“No,” said Felix. “I got a free place because of my dad’s job. We all did.”

“Bullshit,” said Matt again, but less convincingly this time. “You’ve all had years to concoct a cover story.”

“It’s not a story,” said Rowan. He remembered watching a documentary about hostage negotiators and the people who try to talk suicides down from their ledges. The trick, he thought, had been to make people focus on future events, to disengage them from their immediate environment. “You’re welcome to come to the school and find out for yourself. All the records are in there.”

Records: Rowan could almost smell the dust in the archive room, picture the manila file that held Kellaway’s scholarship application and his history. The perspiration that plastered his shirt to his back and chest found a new outlet, springing from his brow and rolling down to blur his vision. He did not get a chance to develop his improved negotiation skills, or test their efficacy; Sophie’s interruption was shrill.

“Please, please, please,
please,
where’s Edie? Is she still . . .” Rowan could see the effort it took her to form the words. “Is she still
alive
?”

Her loss of control seemed to restore coolness in Matt. He casually tossed the blowtorch from one hand to the other. Damn, thought Rowan. Felix and I could have overpowered him just then if only we had been quick enough. If only we could establish eye contact out of Matt’s sight line.

“Who knows, if Kerry’s got her? She’s a bit funny around babies, she doesn’t quite know when to stop,” said Matt in a tone of voice that suggested he was wondering what he’d done with his keys. He placed his thumb on the trigger.

“Edie!” screamed Sophie. The name reverberated off the bare stone walls.

Outside, a small shrill voice sounded for a splinter of a second.

With lightning reflexes, Matt depressed the trigger again to release the disorienting roar. It was impossible now to tell where the disembodied voice came from, whether it really had been the baby. Rowan’s only certainty was that the sound had been outside the cottage and that to reach it they would have to overcome an impenetrable wall of fire.